Nvidia announces Pascal, its 2016 chip

Nvidia just announced a new 2016 chip and it's called Pascal. This is the successor to the Maxwell DirectX 12 architecture and it will bring a few unique features to the market.

The first interesting feature is NVLink, a bandwidth improving inter-chip communication solution that should solve the bandwidth problem faced by multi GPU platforms. It is based on PCIe 3.0 but it can make things significantly faster, 5 to 12 times faster according to Nvidia. This is a huge gain and it should bring communication between the CPU and GPU to a whole new level.

Pascal also packs 3D stacked memory that is in the same chip packaging and it is about a third of the size of a PCIe card. It will launch in 2016, it will follow Moore's Law and deliver 20 Teraflops per second. Just for comparison, the original Tesla launched back in in 2008 was a 1TFLOPS unit, while Maxwell maxes out at 12TFLOPS.

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off the Pascal test module on stage, but we still have to see the demo.

We will ask around and try to find out what happened to Volta, that is either renamed to Pascal, or it got scrapped, but Nvidia's roadmaps placed Volta right after Maxwell.